Parameters

If needle is not a string, it is converted to
an integer and applied as the ordinal value of a character.

offset

If specified, search will start this number of characters counted from
the beginning of the string. Unlike strrpos() and
strripos(), the offset cannot be negative.

Return Values

Returns the position of where the needle exists relative to the beginnning of
the haystack string (independent of offset).
Also note that string positions start at 0, and not 1.

Returns FALSE if the needle was not found.

Warning

This function may
return Boolean FALSE, but may also return a non-Boolean value which
evaluates to FALSE. Please read the section on Booleans for more
information. Use the ===
operator for testing the return value of this
function.

Examples

// Nope, 'a' is certainly not in 'xyz'if ($pos1 === false) { echo "The string '$findme' was not found in the string '$mystring1'";}

// Note our use of ===. Simply == would not work as expected// because the position of 'a' is the 0th (first) character.if ($pos2 !== false) { echo "We found '$findme' in '$mystring2' at position $pos2";}?>

Notes

Note: This function is
binary-safe.

See Also

mb_stripos() - Finds position of first occurrence of a string within another, case insensitive

strpos() - Find the position of the first occurrence of a substring in a string

strrpos() - Find the position of the last occurrence of a substring in a string

strripos() - Find the position of the last occurrence of a case-insensitive substring in a string

It is very bad practice to use the same function name as an existing php function but have a different output format. Someone maintaining the code in the future is likely to be very confused by this. It will also be hard to eradicate from a codebase because the naming is identical so each use of stripos() would have to be analyzed to see how it is expecting the output format (bool or number/bool).

Calling it string_found() or something like that would make a lot more sense for long-term use.